Sabotage: postdoc fiddles with graduate student’s cells

A postdoc has been caught on camera giving a graduate student's cell culture a …

I am shocked. No, wait, I am appalled. Hmm, maybe I am shocked and appalled? Nope, neither actually. Nature is running a story about a postdoc sabotaging a graduate student's work and everyone in the story is, well, shocked and appalled—including the postdoc, apparently.

One Vipul Bhrigu was caught by a hidden camera giving graduate student Heather Ames' cell cultures a little treat: a fatal dose of ethanol. He had, apparently, being doing this to her cell cultures for a while for no other reason than that she was a good student and he felt a bit threatened.

Briefly, Ames was finding that her experiments were giving inconsistent results, and the inconsistencies weren't what you would expect from occasional mistakes. Instead Ames perceived a correlation in the problems and decided that she was being sabotaged. Eventually, she found her cell cultures swimming in ethanol and showed the evidence to her supervisor.

The police were called, but, in a rather soap-operatic turn of events, the police focused their investigation on her. After failing to fit her up for the crime, they finally decided to broaden their search and fit hidden cameras in the lab. Sure enough, they caught Bhrigu rummaging around in the fridge with an ethanol bottle for no apparent reason. He has since confessed, gone through the courts, been sentenced, and skipped the country. For the full details, you should read the Nature story.

At the introduction of this story, I said that I wasn't shocked or appalled, and I remain so. Science is performed by people, and nasty bastards turn up everywhere. Indeed, if you get any senior scientist talking, they will relate stories of being sabotaged, though not in such an obviously criminal way.

It can be easy to think that your work is being sabotaged. When you are working at the edge of what is possible with the equipment you have, it becomes easy to ascribe malice or incompetence to what might be a sequence of random failures.

When Ames story is examined, you find that Bhrigu confessed to a series of crimes, but the sequence of events that led Ames to believe that she was being sabotaged are not among those. That might make it tempting to conclude that Ames was being paranoid, but simply got lucky. In this case, however I suspect that Bhrigu only 'fessed up to what he was caught doing and not a single thing more, rather than Ames being overly paranoid.

Chris Lee / Chris writes for Ars Technica's science section. A physicist by day and science writer by night, he specializes in quantum physics and optics. He lives and works in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.